Her sentences are sharp, and cut deep into bone, such as ‘History flattens. She can see out.’ from the poem ‘[WINDOWER],’ a piece on seeing through and seeing out, and striking at the differences between the two. The collection works through ideas of perception, of seeing, and of conflict through movements on gender, gender relation and gender perception. There is a violence throughout the collection, and a tension…

Windowboxing charts a course towards a sense of identity and concern for gender issues that doesn’t allow itself to be reduced to transparencies or flat reductions of personality. Kaschock has produced a striking work that’s both dry and vibrant, earthed in theory and live in the practice of living.

will you be concerned with
me? your carpet’s pressuremark
tells more than my weight. domesticity
is not ours to speak of. a thousand
tablespoons of saying I was
flattered and still it does not translate
into sugar, psychosis or sin.
will you be unfoundedly finding
wherever you look a want
and refuse its simple request
for warmth or tea? green will mold
itself to any ceramic fault.
things steep, and verbs —
like invitations — may be
declined. it doesn’t work, pasting
ill-fitted pieces together
in humidity. I admit I am
a problem. a naiad ever
first-daying out of her bog —
swampland she can’t sell or sing
away. will you search out
damp footprints while making
grassdog rounds through house and
dewy yard? your eyes will
seize eyes without hint of doubt
in some glass frame, and gasp,
but yours is not the floor I tread
or curl upon. when I lie —
and I do and have — it is across
fields wet with stars, their space
enough to spare.

After remembering I was dis-. Once sewn, strewn. The dear doctor worried terribly that I would be no slave to the murderer he made, that I might choose man. He needn’t have fret. Strung together and electrified, I would not have admired my god. Some gods make our hatred elegant — Victorious. So that it wins in us. I was unmade beneath my god, at which act he could not muster even eternal carnal shame. I was thought better of. He named me refusal. Twice, he rejected his lover/son: once at birth, and once again considering mine. To wake me was (more likely than my assertion of taste or agency) to open a portal, a birth gate, raceflood of the monstrous cloaked in placenta. My god, it must be admitted, lacked a superlative genetic theory. Mendel was in the future and my god stranded on the ice of himself and fiction. If I never was, can I claim a god? Although Limbo was in session, I had stirred as myself in no infant womb; there would be no stillborn baptism nor churchyard burial for my sundering. A century later, my imagined collectivity, my spirit envisioned as beehive, would be captured on the seance of celluloid. But such impressions have no memory. It has to do with where the soul resides. It likes to house itself among disparate parts that come together in beauty. The doctor, once beautiful, lost his soul to his charge. He had nothing left for me to take from him (thieves of life that valueless women are proved by sentimental bauble to be). I have occasion to wonder — when I find myself able to form thoughts regarding form — were my limbs re-harvested from his laboratory floor? I try to imagine what class, what category, what species of god might find herself capable of bending-to-gather, that small, difficult act of kindness and shame.

how I wish you mad. that some cruel ob-
session might drive you from what should be
tender between a man and a woman, or
a man and a man, or a woman and her birds
black. but you are good as a cookie. in-
dulgence is what I am asking, some too-thick
oversweetness to ache us. an exotic morsel
to move a spoilt boy into betrayal’s
sledge, antithetical, pointless as snow-
queen androgyny. Powdery cloy, a ploy, a sleigh
for a heart (in lieu of a heart — a rosebud) don’t
come back with venison. on stormy days I wish
you struck with reanimation–seekily piecing
a christform but with circuits moved by
lightning and a fondness for what is French
and destitute. I could be such a monster. alas
your only deformity is how far from abandon
you plod with love. it is by that slow-avenging
stability I’ll be onefistedly interred.
and your true mistress–she shall orchestrate
the unheroining of me, the white-dusting. By
keeping to me and me sane, you, dear s., have assured
but ruination in this most unbeloved and coldest
country for my kind–comfort.